I decided to attach a Toshiba 500GB USB3 drive to one of the unit's USB3 ports to share it on my network. (Basically, this one.)

I formatted on my PC first as NTFS, and plugged it into the LaCie. After a few moments, I saw this new blank drive on my network.

Great, so far.

I started to fill it up with some files I wanted to archive (about 450 GB). That went as expected. After it was done, I spot checked the newly copied files over the network. All was fine.

I properly ejected the 500GB USB3 drive from the LaCie dashboard and put the drive on a shelf for later use.

Here's where it goes awry.

I go to use this drive by plugging it into my PC (the same one I used to format it in the first place), and my Windows 7 PRO workstation said this drive needed initialized to be used. Of course, I didn't do that. I ejected it and tried it on another workstation, same result. I then tried on a MAC, same result.

So, I plugged it back into the LaCie, and while the 5Big NAS Pro saw it as a drive that was filled to about 98% capacity, I was unable to browse the drive from the network OR from the dashboard's own file browser.

My question is, what the heck happened?

I tried the same process with another USB3 drive, different manufacturer (WD this time, 1TB). Again, when I go to use this drive on a stand alone PC, it's unrecognizable. It's also unreadable by the LaCie itself.

Needless to say, I don't attached USB3 drives to this LaCie NAS anymore. Unfortunately, the contents of the first 500GB USB3 drive are now seemingly lost, as I deleted the source material since I assumed this drive was properly archived.